Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Siegen, Siegen 57076, Germany.
Bender Institute for Neuroimaging (BION), Justus Liebig University, Giessen 35394, Germany.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2019 Jul 31;14(7):769-775. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsz046.
Previous research has linked sensation seeking with a heightened risk for drug abuse and other risk-taking behavior. As appetitive conditioning presents a model for the etiology and maintenance of addictive behavior, investigating sensation seeking in a classical conditioning paradigm might elucidate possible pathways toward addiction within this model. Furthermore, the theoretical concept underlying sensation seeking proposes a negative relationship between reward processing and sensation seeking in only moderately arousing situations, which has been neglected by previous research. This study aimed to investigate this inverse relationship in moderately stimulating situations entailing reward processing using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects (N = 38) participated in a classical conditioning paradigm in which a neutral stimulus (CS+) was repeatedly paired with a monetary reward, while another neutral stimulus (CS-) was not. Imaging results revealed a negative relationship between sensation seeking and neural responses in the insula, amygdala and nucleus accumbens during the early phase and in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex during the late phase of conditioning. These findings suggest reduced reward learning and consequently diminished processing of outcome expectancy in appetitive conditioning in subjects with high sensation seeking scores. The results are discussed with respect to clinical implications.
先前的研究表明，寻求刺激与滥用药物和其他冒险行为的风险增加有关。由于欲望条件反射为成瘾行为的病因和维持提供了一个模型，因此在经典条件反射范式中研究寻求刺激可能会阐明该模型中成瘾的可能途径。此外，寻求刺激的理论概念提出，在适度激发的情况下，奖励处理与寻求刺激之间存在负相关关系，但这一点被先前的研究忽视了。本研究旨在使用功能磁共振成像技术，在涉及奖励处理的适度刺激情况下，研究这种反向关系。受试者（N=38）参与了经典条件反射范式，其中中性刺激（CS+）反复与金钱奖励配对，而另一个中性刺激（CS-）则没有。成像结果显示，在条件反射的早期阶段，寻求刺激与岛叶、杏仁核和伏隔核的神经反应之间存在负相关关系，而在晚期阶段则与背侧前扣带皮层之间存在负相关关系。这些发现表明，在寻求刺激得分较高的受试者中，在奖励学习和随后的预期结果处理方面，食欲条件反射减少。结果将结合临床意义进行讨论。
